How rural education affects farmers' integrated management of invasive insect pests?

BACKGROUND: Rural education helps manage invasive insect pests (IIPs), but how it affects farmers' integrated IIP management remains unknown. We focused on the nationally concerning fall armyworm in China's main invasion area, developed a multidimensional integrated framework, conducted household interviews with a sample size of 666, and applied multinomial logistic regression to assess farmers' integrated pest management capacity and its associations with educational approaches and strategies. RESULTS: Farmers demonstrated medium to high capacity in recognition, control, and container management, but showed deficiencies in health awareness. Agricultural retail stores were the most common approach, while the dominant strategies were traditional, non-public-private partnership, and individual. In all significant associations (versus high capacity), agricultural retail stores and training workshops had selective relationships with medium (odds ratio (OR) 3.94) and high (OR 0.34) capacities, respectively; farming experience had broad but uneven links (OR 0.46-7.60 across all capacities); social media displayed a mixed profile (OR 0.26-2.73 across all capacities). Similarly, non-public-private partnership, single, and individual strategies differentiated farmer capacity (OR 0.19-9.38 across all capacities), associating with high-capacity farmers for knowledge-intensive practices but with low-capacity farmers for simple routines. Traditional strategies showed the most consistent associations with high-capacity farmers in multiple practices (OR 0.27-2.94 across all capacities). CONCLUSION: These findings highlight the integrated roles of rural education in IIP management and support a shift from mono-strategic to integrated education systems. Blending diverse approaches and pairing divergent strategies with collaborative models help build a balanced knowledge infrastructure, equipping farmers with multifaceted skills for integrated IIP management. © 2026 Society of Chemical Industry.